


zenzenzense （前前前世）

by Honeyduker



Category: Bleach
Genre: Body Switch AU, F/M, Lowkey Crack, reverse, shiyoriweek2018
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-17
Updated: 2018-07-17
Packaged: 2019-06-11 19:34:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15322713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Honeyduker/pseuds/Honeyduker
Summary: Oneshot. Shinji/Hiyori, loose "Kimi no Na Wa" AU.  Body Switch, Hiyori is a high schooler in her final year in a small town, and Shinji is a musician / university student. As usual, Kisuke just knows. (Written for Shiyori Week 2018 on Tumblr.)





	zenzenzense （前前前世）

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: do not own bleach.
> 
> You don't have to have seen Kimi no Na Wa to get this fic, but it's also nice if you have!

“I hate this!” Hiyori yells into the sunset from the top of a hill, some four-hundred kilometres from Tokyo City. “In my next life, make me a handsome boy in Tokyo!”

“What a fool,” sighs Mashiro, idly sipping on her chilled pocari sweat.

-

Shinji wakes up in a comfortable futon that he does not remember crawling into, in a room he doesn’t think he’s ever lived in.

He’s wearing a faded hanshin tigers tshirt, and Rilakkuma patterned shorts. Huh. Usually on hot days he’d just sleep topless …

_Topless._

His eyes widen, and his hands shakily move towards his chest.

 _Not the biggest pair of boobs,_ he thinks as he gently squeezes them under his palm. _But not bad._  

_Woah, back the fuck up, what?_

-

“Hiyori, you were crazy at school yesterday,” Mashiro informs her on a hot Wednesday afternoon.

“Whaddya mean?” Hiyori furrows her eyebrows, concerned.

“You don’t remember?” Mashiro asks incredulously. “You rocked up to first period calculus ten minutes late, with your hair loose, didn’t do your homework, and after class you skipped our baseball match against Seireitei Academy and then loudly asked why they ever made such a pig like Hyousube the Japanese teacher, because he chided you for not handing in your paper. You were standing right outside the staff room.”

“WHAT!”

“And you spent all day picking shiba fur off your uniform. As if you cared about a bit of dog fur before, it’s YOUR DOG.”

-

Hiyori has always wondered what it felt like to be tall. Now she knows. She could pick grocery items off the highest shelf without breaking a sweat, and she’s already banged her head more than once due to a misjudgement of her own height.

This dream where she was some tall lanky blonde guy with fifty instruments in his flat was getting a bit too realistic, except for the part where she woke up with the words “Hirako Shinji” scribbled backwards on forearm  – luckily she saw it in a mirror, which saved her having to decipher demented backwards writing, but that didn’t save the ten extra minutes it took her to scrub it off.

Who the fuck was Hirako Shinji?

_BzZz. BzZzZ._

The smartphone on the desk in Hiyori’s room goes off.

The message is from a sender named “Ootoribashi Rojuro”, and it reads “We can perform this Friday at the Kuroneko bar in Shinjuku, after our lectures finish! Kensei is coming to help set up. Is your guitar fixed?”

Hiyori feels dizzy. Lectures? Guitar? Ootoribashi? That instrument against the wall there … nope, too big to be a guitar.

Never mind that, now she also needed to pee... and she hadn’t gotten used to the feeling of something dangling _there_ , between her legs. Uhh, fuck.

-

“Shinji-kun!” Kisuke laughs, spastically fanning himself with three paper fans in a single hand, his mop of unruly blond hair blowing backwards, revealing his forehead.

Shinji raises an eyebrow. “What?”

“I was worried you would rock up for your gig in a tracksuit.”

“Huh?”

“So, Lisa-san tells me you’ve been buying pocky in the afternoons at the convenience store in a tracksuit and flip-flops. I didn’t believe her, but she took a photo and sent it to me.”

Kisuke shoves his phone into Shinji’s face. Shinji squints. This was his white-and-red PE uniform from high school, several years ago. He was pretty sure it was collecting dust a box in his wardrobe. The figure in the photo didn’t have his usual slouch, but Shinji would recognise his own good looks anywhere… even if he was currently clad in a dusty PE tracksuit.

Thing is, he doesn’t remember doing any of this. The only indicator he had was the curious note in his own phone that he had apparently written to himself, which said “Hage, do you know how to purchase groceries? There is pocky in the pantry.”

Shinji wonders at what point his dream self would consider Pocky a staple grocery.

Or was his dream self really that final-year high school girl in a small town somewhere in the Kansai region?

“Do you think you’re switching bodies with someone,” Kisuke whispers to Shinji conspiratorially behind his fan.

Shinji wishes he could dismiss the idea, but in the same way he can’t dismiss these hyper-realistic “dreams” that have been happening to him, he finds himself wanting to agree with Kisuke. A part of him had been suspecting the same thing, but hearing Kisuke voice it out loud confirmed maybe he wasn’t going entirely mad.

-

Cicadas are chirping up a storm outside. The echo of kids laughing in the park across the street form a part of the backdrop noise, and Hiyori is zoning out amidst it all, tracing light circles with her pencil around the words “who are you?” on a blank page in her exercise book.  

“Sarugaki Hiyori!” her chemistry teacher yells, and Hiyori jumps.

Her classmates laugh in unison.

-

Hiyori is back in that room with too many instruments and neat shirts and dress pants and ties. She has a mild headache, but can’t just go back to sleep because someone is aggressively banging the door of what she assumes is this residence.

“Comin’! Jeez, chill the fuck out!” she yells, and her voice is husky from just waking up, and very, very deep.

She’s greeted by a tall, well-built young man with silver hair and stern looking eyes, and another man with scruffy straw-blonde hair, dressed in a deep green jinbei.

Hiyori instinctively takes a step back, and grabs a nearby umbrella off the wall hook. “You guys wanna- wanna fight?!” she growls as menacingly as she can.

“The hell is wrong with you, Shinji?!” the man with the silver hair questions. “You still drunk from last night?”

The blonde haired man reminded Hiyori oddly of a Tanuki, and his eyes twinkled knowingly as he observed her. She didn’t like it.

“Otoribashi?” Hiyori says. The name comes to her mind unbidden.

“Huh?” The silver haired man practically growls.

Well shit. Then it hits her. _She’s_ Shinji. She must be this Hirako Shinji person with the lack of groceries in his fridge and the hangover and the five million instruments. So this person is …

“Kensei, maybe we should give Shinji-kun some time to clean up,” the tanuki-face says.

“Mmn.” This person called Kensei grunts.

“Yeah, I have a massive fucking headache.” Hiyori says as she walks towards where she knows the bathroom to be.

“Wait, did you just say I, like _uchi_?” the tanuki-face stops Hiyori in her tracks. “I know you’re a kansai-jin but…”

Hiyori furrows her brows and whips her head around. “Boku...?” she amends, impatiently.

The tanuki-face cocks an eyebrow, and the Kensei man looks very unimpressed.

“Ore…?!” Hiyori practically growls.

The two of them nod slowly, one looking very exasperated, the other very thoughtful.

-

Shinji almost forgets what a drag it was to be in high school. Today it seems he’s forgotten to do his hair again, but he’s combed it all neat. His “friend”, Mashiro, has omitted to mention what _hairstyle_ he’s meant to have. Only that it looks “nice” loose as well. He agrees. He spent a good ten minutes staring into his own eyes in the mirror today – he was quite intrigued by the honey amber colour of his eyes, and the cute freckles on his face.

He notices that his classmates are staring at him from across the courtyard. Shinji winks at them, and they look away, flustered.

Jeering shouts echo from nearby, and Shinji notices a couple of guys from his year level teasing someone from his advanced chemistry class he knows as “Akon”.

Shinji looks on impassively, as they give Akon a light shove and tear his necktie off, throwing it into a bush.

Mashiro looks on perplexed as “Hiyori” retrieves the necktie, fixes the garment into a neat, clean knot, and passes it back to Akon, who embarrassedly mutters “thanks, Sarugaki.”

Mashiro’s jaw drops, and Shinji asks, “what?”

Mashiro blinks. “Ahh, I’m hungry but I forgot my lunch today,” she announces.

Shinji automatically hands his leftover melon bread to her. “Take mine, I’ve got at least two here.”

Mashiro blinks again, and stares at the bread being offered to her.

Shinji shoves it at her again. “What? What’s wrong?”

Mashiro peers at Shinji, and scrunches up her nose in what Shinji thinks is supposed to be an imitation of Hiyori. “Usually, you say something like, _I’m not hungry at all, this bread is gross, I’ll give it to you today.”_

Shinji stares mutely at the bread in his hands, thinking, s _hit, this Hiyori girl is a tsundere. That’s too much work._

-

 _“Stop spending my money on pocky_.” Hiyori blearily reads the note on her phone. She’s holding her own phone in her own hands, in her own futon, in her own room. Always a good start to the day. _“And stop wearing my old PE track suit in public, do it in your own body…”_ Hiyori feels an irrational jolt of rage rush through her.

“BRING SOME LUNCH TO SCHOOL, DAMN IT, AND STOP BUYING FOOD FROM THE CANTEEN, YA DAMN BALDY!” she yells back at her phone to no one in particular. “I’M BROKE!”

“Hiyori, are you alright up there?!” came the voice of Hikifune Kirio, Hiyori’s relative and guardian.

“Fine!” Hiyori roars back.

Hikifune slides the Shoji door of Hiyori’s bedroom open. “You’re not feeling your own boobs today?” she chuckles.

Hiyori takes a moment to process this.

“WHAT.”

-

It is a Friday in autumn, and Hiyori can still never get used to how big a university campus is. Shinji has asked Hiyori to attend classes on his behalf, to meet attendance requirements… and she couldn’t say no, since he was doing the same for her – even if it was to keep up appearances for both their sakes.

Much to her chagrin, every time she turned up at a lecture, her friends seemed surprised that he was on campus at all. And no, it was not because they knew Hiyori’s secret and that she had no idea where she was the whole time, it was because Shinji was apparently a serial truant when it came to lectures.

Attending lectures were okay, as the attendance was all she was there for. She even agreed to dress the way Shinji instructed her, or else he threatened to bin his tracksuit completely. Shinji was a music major, so it was the practical side of things that got hard. Hiyori knew how to play a bit of the koto, but that was basically it. Shinji, was apparently a musical _god._

Hiyori sits awkwardly on a stool, leaning backwards to rest her elbows on the top of a closed piano lid. She idly observes her classmates tune and fiddle their respective instruments.

“See, I told you he was never that good,” she heard one of them whisper, shooting covert glances her way. “I heard his family is just rich, so he bought his way in to this university.”

“Yeah, I heard the same thing,” the other classmate replies. “And he dresses like he’s better than us all the time, it pisses me off.”

Hiyori glares at the gossipers. “Hey,” she nudges Kisuke. “Are they talking about me?”

“Uh, probably.” Kisuke answers. 

Hiyori huffs, and unleashes a short and violent kick at a sheet music stand in front of her. It topples, sending a flurry of sheet music into the air, the fall cascading onto nearby rows of sheet music stands.

The crashing sound was thunderous, and the silence that followed was deafening.  

Hiyori looks her classmates dead in the eye, and smirks.

Kisuke is laughing until tears form in his eyes, doubled over the shamisen he is clutching.

Some part of Hiyori feels like the tanuki-face _knows._

-

As the seasons turned into Winter, Hiyori and Shinji found their body switches happening less and less, until at some point, Hiyori concluded it had ceased altogether.

A part of her felt relieved, and a part of her felt oddly lonely, like a part of herself was missing.

She did not know ultimately what had caused the soul switch to occur in the first place – maybe it was something to do with the myths and stories that are said to happen on summer nights. Hiyori would never have believed it before, but she could believe just about anything now.

She wanted to talk to him, but she didn’t know how, short of buying a shinkansen ticket to Tokyo to look for him. She could have asked when she still had the chance, but she’d rather be dead before she did such a thing.

Her university entrance exams were coming up, and Hiyori flicks through her old notes.

This exercise book is from when the switches first started happening, and she sees the “who are you”, in handwriting that does not belong to her.

Her heart beats faster.

She flicks to the next page full of notes, and a penguin-shaped sticky note falls out.

 _“If we never switch again…”_ it reads. _“come to Tokyo for University. You’re one of the smartest in your year, you can do it.”_

Then there is an address for a bar called the _“Kuroneko Bar”,_ scrawled at the bottom.

Hiyori doesn’t know why but she feels hot tears burn at her eyes. “Don’t tell me what to do, baldy,” she chokes out.

-

Almost a year has passed since Hiyori stopped switching into Hirako Shinji’s body. She topped her year in final exams, and made it to the city of Tokyo.

It’s because the universities here are good, Hiyori would constantly tell herself. I’m not here because of _him._

She could taste the half-truth, and the half-lie, on her tongue every time.

She still hadn’t gone to the Kuroneko bar, and she still hadn’t seen Shinji.

However, she had finished her first semester of exams in university, and she was free, and she just happened to be in the area, and she happened to pass by the bar, she just happened to be very curious…

Brushing the noren aside, Hiyori enters a dimly lit bar with dark wooden tables and lantern lights adorning the ceiling.

A scruffy-haired bartender with an uchiwa fan greets her, his eyes twinkling.

“Irasshaimasse!”

Hiyori’s breath catches in her throat. She would recognise that Tanuki-face anywhere.

“We have a special performer tonight, who happens to be my good friend, actually,” the bartender casually informs Hiyori. “In fact, I might make a cameo performance later.”

He gestures towards the back of the bar, where there is a small stage set up at the end.

Upon the stage, sitting on a stool with a guitar-and-mic set-up, was someone Hiyori had dreamed about for months.

Shinji was dressed neatly in a plain white t-shirt and well-fitted jeans to match the atmosphere of the establishment, and he had a fancy sort of hat on.

She couldn’t look away. She didn’t know if she wanted to hug him or punch him in the gut.

Shinji looks up and meet her eyes, taking in that familiar hanshin tigers t-shirt Hiyori was wearing over tight jeans and her pair of scuffed red converses.

Something in his gaze made Hiyori feel very self-conscious, and the other patrons in the bar were also starting to look at her.

Shinji smiles softly, and Hiyori stands there like a deer caught in headlights.

“My next song is for you,” Shinji says into the mic. “This is _Zenzenzense_ , by The Radwimps.”

-

**BONUS:**

_“Hage, could you learn some baseball rules, god damn it?”_ Shinji reads the note scrawled over his sheet music. “ _And stop agreeing to help all of my classmates with school work, it’s a PAIN!”_

Shinji laughs. He makes a mental note to ask Hiyori to start learning fingerstyle guitar, if he starts practicing baseball. This was gonna be good.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! This is just a fun fic that came to my mind, it's not as complex as the AU it's based off so don't think too hard, I don't think I have that much power to write something like Kimi no Na Wa :p PS. Zenzenzense is a good song!


End file.
